Liberals under pressure to fix Ontario’s child protection system

( above is headline The Star newspaper website )

website version - In more than half of child abuse investigations reviewed by auditor general Bonnie Lysyk’s office, the children’s aid societies failed to make mandatory checks of the Ontario Child Abuse Register.

The Ontario government is under
pressure to fix a child protection system criticized by the
auditor general for putting some children in “serious risk.”

In her report, Bonnie Lysyk
describes a child protection system riddled with problems,
from badly conducted abuse investigations to a floundering
Ministry of Children and Youth Services that fails to
oversee Ontario’s privately run children’s aid societies.

At stake are the lives of 15,625
children who, on average, were in foster or group-home care
in 2014-15, and the well-being of thousands more
investigated for possible abuse.

In more than half of child abuse
investigations reviewed by Lysyk’s office, the children’s
aid societies failed to make mandatory checks of the Ontario
Child Abuse Register. The register would note if caregivers
had a history of abuse.

“Failure to conduct these crucial
history checks puts children in serious risk of being placed
or left in the care of individuals with a history of abusing
children,” Lysyk’s report states.

This unacceptable practice
continues, Lysyk’s report notes, despite lessons that should
have been learned at least 13 years ago. It recalls the
tragic case of five-year-old Jeffrey Baldwin, who died in
2002 after years of mistreatment at the hands of his
maternal grandparents. The Catholic Children’s Aid Society
of Toronto failed to check its own internal records, which
would have flagged the grandparents’ previous convictions
for child abuse.

“Can Premier (Kathleen) Wynne
please explain why she is allowing children to be placed in
homes when the abuse register hasn’t been checked?” asked
New Democrat MPP and children’s services critic Monique
Taylor.

“How is it possible that we aren’t
learning from mistakes after children in care die?” she
added in a statement.

Children and Youth Services
Minister Tracy MacCharles told the CBC her office has
ordered societies to check the child abuse register,
describing failure to do so as “unacceptable.”

But societies are pushing back.
Mary Ballantyne, head of the Ontario Association of
Children’s Aid Societies, says societies use a different
database, called Fast Track, to check child abuse histories.
She says societies want to discuss with MacCharles whether
the added check of the Ontario registry should continue to
be mandatory.

Much of the auditor’s findings
confirm the results of
an ongoing
Star investigation, including a patchwork of practices
and child protection services across Ontario.

Lysyk’s report describes a
ministry ignorant about the quality of care provided for the
$1.47 billion it gave to children’s aid societies last year,
and uninformed about how children in care are doing.

The ministry often failed to
enforce compliance with regulations when its inspectors
identified problems in group or foster homes. In some cases,
it didn’t even inform caregivers of the problems inspectors
found, the report adds.

Lysyk’s office audited cases
investigated by seven children’s aid societies in Toronto,
Durham, Kingston, Sudbury, Muskoka, Hamilton and Waterloo. A
total of about 70 cases were audited, a sample so small that
some societies question the reliability of the results, says
Ballantyne.

“We are constantly trying to
improve the system,” Ballantyne adds, citing internal
initiatives examining practices that have come under
scrutiny.

Lengthy investigations are also
putting children at risk, the report adds. Societies often
failed to start investigating abuse allegations within the
required time — no more than seven days. And, on average,
investigations took more than seven months to complete — far
more than the 30-day deadline imposed by government
standards. One investigation took more than two years to
complete.

Lysyk seemed especially concerned
by the number of child protection cases investigated, closed
and then reopened. In almost half of the reopened cases
reviewed, factors that placed the children’s safety at risk
were still present when the case was initially closed.

“We found that societies may be
closing cases prematurely, risking the well-being of
children,” the report says.

The report also criticizes
societies for failing, in many cases, to draft or review
plans of care, designed to address the health, education or
behavioural needs of children placed in foster or group
homes.

“When it comes to child protection
standards, there is little to no practice by the
child-welfare system in using them, other than for perhaps a
nice thought,” said Irwin Elman, Ontario’s Advocate for
Children and Youth.

“It feels like every week, there’s
another story about the child-welfare system in crisis,” he
added in a blog post Thursday.

The auditor also found that about
half of children’s aid societies had their funding reduced
in 2013-14, forcing some to cut frontline staffing and
eliminate programs for children receiving protection.

Societies also had to use money
from operating budgets to fully cover the cost of
implementing The Child Protection Information System, a
standardized province-wide database linking all societies.
Its $150 million price tag is expected to balloon by another
$50 million by the time it’s fully in place in 2019-20.

Delays and cost overruns were due,
in part, to “poor project planning and management” by the
ministry, the Auditor General found.

Nearly one in 10 girls and one in 20 boys say they have been raped or
experienced some other form of abusive violence on a date, according to
a study released Sunday at the annual meeting of the American Psychological
Association.
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www.Repeal43.org